Ah, euphemisms. They make our lives so neat and tidy. When I was young I had a friend who's uncle was out of work, addicted to drugs, and living on his couch. His father liked to tell us that his uncle was just 'down on his luck'. A little while after that I had a girlfriend who lost interest in me, found a new man, and wanted nothing to do with me. She told me she just needed 'space'. More recently, we've had military police use electrodes on prisoner's genitals and stack them into human pyramids while hooded, we've had soldiers slaughter an entire family in Haditha for revenge, and a soldier rape a 15 year old girl and kill her to destroy the evidence. Now our president and those in the punditry world that stoop to new lows to defend this war tells us this is the work of a few 'bad apples'.
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Bad apples? These acts were the result of Bush sending a bushel of ripe, healthy, perfectly good apples out in the desert for three years to rot. These aren't bad apples. These soldiers have become monsters, not bad apples. To call them bad apples is to imply that the general who makes the call to bomb an 'insurgent hideout' with disregard to the innocent civilian who are killed and counted as collateral damage is a good apple. It implies that the man who decided to engage in this senseless war is a good apple. Bullshit.
Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, Limbaugh, Coulter, Leiberman, and every other public figure who sat around an air conditioned studio participating in an unrelenting war push are responsible for these actions. THEY are the bad apples. No, they're worse then bad apples. They're scurvy. Scurvy produces insanity, it's that simple.
Now we got North Korea launching missiles and openly persuing nuclear weapons. This same North Korea that was a part of that legendary Axis of Evil. Bush wants to use dimplomacy this time and all his minions fall in line to support that position. Are we living in Bizarro land? Up is down, black is white. The country with no WMD, a pathetic military, and basically held in check by sanctions was the immediate threat that required unilateral war. The country with a million man army, the motivation to aquire nukes (especially after Bush openly grouped them with the country we promptly invaded), and an eccentric, unpredictable leader we're told should be approached with talks and diplomacy.
Saaay what?
Isn't it time to put a boot in their ass? Isn't that the American way? Where's the clever internet ads that show a burger king sign in Korean? Isn't it time for racists to begin spilling their ignorant drivel? Where's Coulter claiming that Kim Jong wants to change our way of life? Don't they hate our freedom? Where's alll the war mongering, the American badass bravado? Under the leadership of Bush and his republican henchmen we've become nothing more than school yard bullies who beat up on easy targets while talking out of both sides of our mouths when confronted with real dangers.
Now I'm not saying we go fly off the handle like we did in March of 03 and attack the North Koreans, I'm jsut saying that our soft response to this crises reveals the outright lie of WMD in Iraq as the basis for this war. This hypocriscy completely shreds to smithereens the neocons' arguments that Iraq was necessary for American safety. We all know it was a lie. This war is and always was unnecessary. The bad apples that live in the white house, debate on the senate floor, and get powdered up before going in front of cameras are vacillating their asses off right now.
Let's halt the euphemisms. The soldiers who are commiting these awful acts are stressed-out, war-worn animals, the leaders who put them there are criminals, and the media who dutiful complies to pushing Bush's lies are accomplices to war crimes.
Euphemisms are handy, they make us think that things aren't as bad as they really are. But guess what? Things over there are really bad. Let's be adults and call a spade a spade. War is hell, it's inhumane. Men killing men. Men raping children. It's time to bring all the apples home, the good ones, the pushed-to-the-limit ones, and the downright rotten ones.